The text searching is man-machine, with the human contribution consisting of "translating" a retrieval question expressed in customary biomedical language into lists of "clue words" for input to the computer search. Techniques are being studied which output not merely whole papers as units, but passages from within papers. Twenty three real questions from biomedical specialists are being used in the study. The questions concern cardiovascular effects of drugs. The papers to be retrieved for a question are those which are "answer-reporting" for it, i.e. an answer to the question can be inferred from the paper. An answer-reporting paper is successfully retrieved if a passage from it is output which is either itself answer-reporting or is "answer-indicative"; i.e. it can be inferred from the passage (e.g., a figure caption) that the paper is answer-reporting. To date, clue words selected by an information specialist with only limited biomedical knowledge, aided by a medical dictionary and several standard medical textbooks, have successfully retrieved 97% of the answer-reporting papers. To date, 70% of the answer-reporting papers each contain a sentence which is answer-reporting or answer-indicative. The other papers each contain a sentence which becomes an answer-sentence when automatically "augmented" by computer techniques so far 100% successful.